To Hype or Not To Hype: That is the "TRON" Question

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Over the summer, we were in San Diego for the third annual appearance of the "TRON: Legacy" posse at Comic-Con and were less than enthused. The reboot of the 1982 sci-fi flick has been like peas and carrots with the yearly geek-a-thon since it was first announced, and now it had been hyped a record three times to hype the film, beginning before even a single frame of footage had been captured.

Seeing the cast there, yet again, we had to fight the urge to shout, "Norm!"

Starring Michael Sheen, Olivia Wilde, Garrett Hedlund and, of course, Jeff Bridges, digitally enhanced to look like he's been visiting Jennifer Aniston's dermatologist, back in January we wrote, "every time we see ["TRON"s] weird, dark "Speed Racer" looking trailer, we get a bad feeling in the pit of our stomach. Is it just us or is the suck potential of that movie super high?"

While we can't speak to the film's final product--it has yet to be completed and screened--as far as potential goes, we now have nothing but the highest hopes and greatest praise thanks to nine incredible minutes we recently saw.

Hey, when we're wrong, we say we're wrong.

This weekend, we found ourselves at Disneyland's new attraction/interactive marketing campaign, ElecTRONica. Part of California Adventure, it features a techno dance party, old school games like Centipede and Pac-Man in Flynn's arcade (no secret passage ways, we checked) and an exclusive preview of the film that they tout as being 3D but, thanks to timed lights and blasts of wind, felt more like 4D.

Walking out of that mini preview, we were giddier than a schoolgirl at a Justin Bieber hair-flipping contest.

Follow up films are tricky, especially when they come almost twenty years after the original, but "Legacy" seems to take everything that made the original great and amp it to eleven. Unlike the Lucas effect, where too much technology ruins a good thing ("Episode One," anyone?), "TRON: Legacy" needed to be made in the 21st Century, with all that CGI and 3D have to offer, in order to do visual justice to a story that started in the BetaMax Era.

If the film's two-hour running time can hold up to or surpass what they offer in those nine minutes, "Legacy" might just land in the pantheon of great new sci-fi action flicks, alongside J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" and Neill Blomkamp's "District 9."